Improving Open Web Architectures

Abstract

When people use the Internet today, they use their browsers to connect to a web server located anywhere in the world and download a specified page that they have requested. Unless this page contains a Form, CGI-Script, Java Script or a Java Applet (providing of course the user's browser supports Java), there is no other way the user can interact with the web page. Even with this interaction, the user is still physically unable to edit the page itself so the source HTML code for the page can never be edited remotely. Jiki is an open web architecture that will allow anyone to edit pages freely on the web. The system is written as a set of distributed Java components that communicate with HTTP. Although Jiki offers an adequate solution for editing in a permissive environment, its lack of security (users can edit web-pages and manipulate them freely without any restrictions or version control) means that they can place not only text, but also images, sounds and perhaps scripts that may not be desired by the "owner" of the page. The objective of this dissertation is to add authenticity and trust to Jiki. This involves designing, developing and integrating a security framework into the Jiki architecture.